CHRISTMAS IN THE JUNGLE

Evening Star, Issue 15064, 21 December 1912, Page 6

CHRISTMAS IN THE JUNGLE

There axe compensations of exile, and one of_ them is the storing up of memories to which one may look forward to reverting in tenderly reminiscent fashion in some ■remote . old age. In such a country as India there is scarcely a week that passes but has some of its days made memorable by some extraordinary event. Variety itself becomes so common as to be very near monotony. Memory on memory accumulates—of the camp, the plain, the temple, the city— to bo carried nome and dwelt on till, if ifc may bc e so, it is laid to rest in the green of some churchyard 6 ; 00(3 miles away in the sweet repose of English morning dews, I lived once in a small station in the plains of Northern India at Christmastide. We .wore a happy family, as people mostly are in small stations, and it was iii no spirit of misanthropy I wished to escape tae Christmas revels. But for a long time I had been mysteriously attracted by a large green space on the map which hung in the mess marked with the simple word no-man’s-laiid some 20 miles away across the river. I was still a “ griffin,” and that magic word jungle held for me all that was left of old schoolboy dreams. I could dream, if I could not express, all the episodes of the Jungle Books, could imbue myself with the spirit of vast shadows and silences, the solemn theatre of war of beasts that lived their own lives far out of the ken of man. Long before I saw India I knew the Indian jungle. I should see it as some philosopher steeped for life in the classics might see Athens or Rome; and yet not quite, for to him they would be but the dead bones of his conceptions, while for me the jungle lived and breathed. . On the morning before Christmas Day I was rattling down the road bn an Indian okka, with my kitmughar and orderlv on another ekka rattling behind. We crossed the river by a bridge of boats, and spent an hour stniggling across a great plain of loose white sand, off which we emerged at last on to another road. We were now in the region of the Terai, that great malarious tract of low country that stretches between Nepaul and the tributary rivers of the Ganges. A small nar-row-gauge railway ran north from this point almost to the frontier of NepauL There was a train up and down once a day. I caught the former and with my servant and orderly got down at a tiny station buried iu leak forest some 25 miles to the north.

Round the station the great alluvial plains rolled away for miles and miles, for the most part waste, but here and there interrupted by oases of cultivation where the crops shone green—wheat, and barley, and dal, and sugar-cane; and here and there a small mud village stood out on the mound which ruins of previous villages had gradually accumulated, and in one part to the north the fringe of the jungle came down like a cape into the sea. Opposite the station was a small stueoo temple, with its single pointed dome, its small stone platform, and its grotesque paintings of mythology on its ago-stained walls. I determined to camp on the edge of the jungle, which was about a mile away, and by the time my small camp was ready it was evening—Christmas Eve. Behind me, 50yds away, the jungle swept to right and left in a solid phalanx of teak trees, with a scattering of thorny bushes guarding it from the open plain; A full moon rose above it, flooding with light a scene of majestic desolation and calmness. From one of the villages came the gleam of fires and the throb, throb of a tom-tom, and at times, so still was the air, we could hear the voices of the men shouting their songs. After dinner by my camp fire I turned into my tent, but it was long before I slept. Two or three times during the night I lifted the curtain of the tent and looked out into the open. Its early grandeur was now heightened by a thin, cold mist,' which half concealed things in a spectral veil, while so still and empty was it, I might have been the last man left on earth. Once it was the howling of a pack of jackals that roused me, and from my tent'door I saw the whole string of them running about on the plain under the shadow of a huge old blasted peepul tree that stood like a skeleton sentinel, with withered and contorted arms, about a bowshot from the other trees. The only sound that came from the jungle was a curious rattling noise, which I was told was made by the deer knocking their antlers against the trunks to rid them of the velvet. In England, 1 thought, with the self-same moon shining down on rows of glistening roofs, the waits would bo inviting tired Christians to salute the happy mom. In the morning I was up with the etm and wandering in the dew-drenchcd jungle with my rifle. I saw nothing but two barking deer, which were too quick for me, and an old white-whiskered Langur monkey, which leapt from a tree almost to my feet, giving me a fine start, for I thought at first it was a panther. After breakfast I shot over a largo reed-bor-dered jheel, bagging two ducks and a khulan, a large stork-like bird supposed to bo a- great delicacy. After this it rained for the rest of the day so persistently that by evening I had to pack my tent and trudge over the plain back to the station. The station consisted of a low platform, with the babu’s quarters, and a wide, open brickwork arch. In this arch I took refuge, and my bearer niade a fire in one comer and roasted the khulan. In the middle of my Christmas the little train cam© steaming in, <^n ,PP.i n g 'with the rain, and out on to tlie platform sprang Ram Bux, with his wife and children, his earthen pots and tm boxes, and went off on his long tramo o™ the plain to his village. The lights w w train threw long, bright shadows into the ram, the steam hissed up among tno teak trees, and off she went at last, rue to my dinner and ray solitude, tnorain turned to a furious storm, with flash after flash of lightning, gusts of wind, swept fiercely through the arch and hurled sh °wers of water from the trees. I fastened the tent across one of the gates of the arch as a screen from the wind, rolled mysejf in blankets on a form, and So spent me rest of Christmas Day.—Arthur W. Hewlett, in the ‘Manchester Guardian.’